“Newell was asking about what we wanted to do with the extra time, and he said there was no data to suggest a delay was going to hurt us, and that in fact all the stuff we said we wanted to do for the game made it sound like it was going to be really good.”

Project delays are usually particularly thorny issues for game development studios. In some cases, games cannot be delayed past certain millstones in the fiscal year calendar.

The deadline-driven culture of game development, as well as increasing demands on a game’s quality and polish, are key contributors to crunch work that plagues game studios.